'Vampire' hotel bomber from California dies in Bolivian prison

LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) -- A convicted hotel bomber from California
who modeled himself on a fictional vampire has died after becoming
ill in prison, officials said Tuesday.

Twenty-six-year-old Triston Jay Amero was serving a 30-year
sentence for bombing two low-rent hotels in the Bolivian capital of
La Paz in 2006. Two Bolivians died in one of the attacks.

Juan Carlos Limpias, a senior official in the national prison
service, said Amero complained of stomach pains Monday night in his
cell and was taken to a hospital, where he died.

An autopsy showed Amero died of pulmonary edema -- a swelling or
fluid in the lungs -- said Antonio Torres, chief medical examiner
for the Bolivian police.

Torres said further tests will show if a poison or drug caused
the death. U.S. Embassy officials attended the autopsy but made no
statements to the news media.

Amero's mother, contacted at her home in Northern California,
said her son had become ill periodically while living in
Bolivia.

"It's a very unsanitary condition," Dawna Scheda told The
Associated Press in a telephone interview. "His lungs were not
working to capacity. It's a very high altitude -- 14,000 feet. The
water is poor; he'd been having stomach ailments."

Scheda said her son was in good health when a family
representative brought him food on Saturday but feared for his
well-being because of poor prison conditions.

"He was not safe there," she said. "He was basically living in a
four-by-seven dungeon, and it was horrible. I had been trying to
get everyone I could think of to address it, and they did
nothing."

Scheda said she is investigating whether she can take legal
action as a result of her son's death. She does not intend to
travel to Bolivia and was unsure if her son's body would be
returned to the U.S.

A native of Placerville, a former Gold Rush-era town about 40
miles east of Sacramento, the state capitalAmero adopted the name
of Lestat Claudius de Orleans y Montevideo -- a variation on a
character in Anne Rice's vampire novels.

Also convicted in the bombings was Amero's Uruguayan girlfriend,
Alda Ribeiro Costa, 47.

Amero's case briefly caused a bizarre kink in Bolivian-U.S.
relations when President Evo Morales referred to him as a
terrorist.

"The U.S. government fights terrorism, and they send us
terrorists," Morales declared shortly after Amero's arrest. U.S.
officials denied any ties to Amero, and said the comment hurt
relations with Bolivia.

According to U.S. court documents, Amero received psychiatric
treatment off and on since age 7, and spent years at a juvenile
detention center. He was serving his sentence in isolated
conditions at the grim, maximum-security Chonchocoro prison on the
wind-swept outskirts of La Paz.

"We could see he had psychological problems," said Ramiro
Llanos, who served as national prison director until August. "He
had poor relations with the rest of the prisoners. He shouted and
threatened them."

Prison officials said Amero last year was caught hiding gasoline
in his cell and admitted plotting to immolate prison officials,
fellow inmates and even a U.S. diplomat sent to visit him.

In earlier travels through South America, Amero had described
himself as a Saudi Arabian lawyer, a pagan high priest, a public
notary and even a vampire. At one point, he was jailed for
allegedly bombing an automatic cash machine in northern
Argentina.

He moved to Bolivia in 2004 and settled in the mining town of
Potosi, where dynamite is sold freely in the street. He obtained
the simple license required to sell the explosives and opened a
shop - even printing a promotional poster of Ribeiro posing nude
with a box of dynamite.